- Differentiated activities and cooperative learning techniques can occur during units of instruction and enhance students’ practice of content at individual levels within a large-class format.
- Mnemonic techniques can help students remember information. This is especially helpful for students with mild disabilities who have memory problems.
- It is not enough to provide hands-on activities for students. Students must be well-prepared to participate in both the academic and social activities involved in group work.
- Tomlinson (1995) describes nine techniques that can be used for differentiated instruction. She maintains that these techniques can be used for all students, and that differentiated techniques are a must in today’s classrooms if teachers are going to be responsive to diverse learning needs.
- Individualized does not mean one-to-one instruction, which is impossible for a general education teacher to do all the time. Individualized instruction does mean that students are beginning at, learning from, and progressing to appropriately challenging and relevant information.
- The differentiation techniques presented throughout this module can enable teachers to plan and deliver accommodations and adaptations for all students.
Cooperative learning techniques have also been used by middle and high school teachers to promote student learning.
- Collaborative Strategic Reading (CSR) is a method designed for teachers working with diverse learners, and focuses on practice activities that enhance text comprehension and procedures that facilitate peer-mediated interventions (Bryant, Vaughn, Linan-Thompson, Ugel, Hamff, & Hougen, 2000; Vaughn, Klingner, & Bryant, 2001).
- Students who are taught techniques to use memory-enhancement strategies, like mnemonics, can improve their short and long-term memory, achieve higher grades on assignments where recall of information is required, and spend more of their time applying information to higher-level thinking tasks (Mastropieri & Scruggs, 1998).
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